Home ownership

A Nation of Renters?

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It’s the nearly daily phone calls, emails, or letters offering to buy my house, often “as is.”

It’s noticing the increasing number of homes in our neighborhood that are rentals.

It’s the story of residents in a nearby municipality fighting the efforts of a company to build a development of homes that all would be for rent only. And this is not affordable housing but homes with rents of $2300 to $2700 a month.

It is the complaint of friends trying to buy homes finding themselves either priced out of a rapidly rising market in neighborhoods they could at one time have bought in, or trying to make offers, often above asking price on homes before they hit the market and coming in second or third in the bidding.

It’s the skyrocketing of home values in our area, evident in the most recent property valuation from our county auditor nearly doubling its value. I’m glad we bought here 33 years ago. I probably couldn’t now.

There are some dynamics that are peculiar to our market. We have a housing shortage in the one part of the state where population is rapidly growing. A number of tech giants are building new plants or data or distribution centers in our community, and this is having a multiplier effect on construction, supporting industries, infrastructure development, and the education sector. It means more jobs, more people, and more needs for housing.

One of the factors contributing to all of this are big investors and corporations buying up homes to rent. Many of these are out of state. American Homes for Rent (AMH) is one such company, one of the major players nationally in this growing trend. They own 2100 homes in our market and 2000 in another major city in our state, They are the company behind the proposed development exclusively consisting of rental homes mentioned above. In our area, home ownership has dropped from 60% in 2005 to 53% in 2019. Our county now has the highest ratio of renters to owners in our state. In 2021, institutional investors bought 33,000 homes in our state, accounting for 21 percent of all sales, double from just the year before. That is how fast this is growing.

All of this is legal, mostly because our laws have not kept up with this trend of institutional home-buying. Legislators are beginning to propose measures to regulate these efforts, remove some tax breaks or even increase taxes on these enterprises. Local municipalities are beginning to resist efforts to create rental only developments. Tonight’s news brought a report that the local community where American Homes for Rent was seeking to build such a development has voted down this development.

Not all that is legal is right. In this case I also believe this is poor public policy.

Neighborhoods with high percentages of home ownership are better maintained and more stable. The transience of rentals leads to less ties among neighborhoods, less looking out for each other.

It has never been demonstrated that absentee landlords care for properties to the same standard as home owners.

Home ownership is one of the most significant factors contributing to intergenerational wealth. We have witnessed a growing disparity between the wealthiest among us and the rest of our country.

Much of the earnings of institutional investors are siphoned away from our communities. At one time, your mortgage lender was a local banker and often a significant part of your payments were cycled back to depositors or lent out to others. Homeowners spent money repairing and improving their homes at local businesses or hired local people to do work on those homes. Homeowners have far more of, and a different stake, in local issues than do institutional investors.

The question we have to face as a society is how much we value home ownership by individuals and families versus big, off-site corporations and financial institutions? There is so much of the “local” that many of our communities have already lost from local restaurants and small businesses. People owning the place in which they live is one of the last redoubts of the local. The more one diminishes the number of people who are stakeholders in a community, the more that community is at the mercy of those with money and power–whether that of impersonal, off-site interests or local gangs and corrupt organizations. The greater the amount of the homes, businesses, and other tangible institutions of a community are controlled by off-site interests, the less there is a fabric of community linking people together.

So what is to be done? I am not an expert in these things but it seems that a starting point is to figure out ways to level the playing field. Big investors often offer to buy homes “as is,” pay cash, pay above market prices, and have greater access about homes coming on the market. That doesn’t sound like a level playing field. I wonder what might be done about that? Might there be ways to assist individual buyers if it is not possible to offset the advantages for institutional investors. Sellers do have the option to not sell to institutional buyers who are not covered as a protected class under Fair Housing Laws. But they might have to accept a lower offer. What if there were offsets, like credits on capital gains taxes, for sellers who make this choice?

One thing is clear. We face a choice about whether we will be a nation of owners or renters.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Spring Cleaning

/ rtrube54 / 8 Comments

spring cleaningHave you started your spring cleaning yet? Chances are, if you grew up in Youngstown cleaning wasn’t just something you did when the fancy struck you. There was spring cleaning and fall cleaning, with routines for each time of the year marked by the transition from cold weather to hot, or hot weather to cold.

One of the basic tasks of the spring was windows. Most of us grew up with old fashion storm windows that had to be removed to put in screens. So you washed windows, put away the storms and got those screens in so you could get some ventilation in the house on those hot summer days before air conditioning.

Then there was the putting away of all those winter clothes — with mothballs or cedar blocks, or in cedar chests — and pulling out your summer things to see if they still fit. Those mothballs probably weren’t good for us, but at least our clothes weren’t moth-eaten.

Of course, this was the time when the house was scrubbed from top to bottom. Drapes were washed and rehung, walls cleaned, furniture shampooed, everything given a good dusting and vacuuming, and all the dishes that weren’t used regularly pulled out and washed. In some cases, this would be the time to re-paint before the hot summer weather.

Mom did most of this indoor work, and it was a lot! This was still in the days when many women stayed home and work around the home occurred along pretty strict gender lines–inside work was mom’s, outside work was dad’s and we helped as needed–girls inside, boys outside.

There was outdoor cleanup as well. You cleaned up all the debris from the winter. I remember dad “rolling” the yard with a heavy roller to even out the high spots so it would be easier to mow. Before there were all-season radials, there were snow tires to pull off the car, replacing them with regular tires. We’d clean and sweep out the garage. And we would get the beds around the house ready for planting flowers and vegetables, clearing out any weeds, turning over the soil, maybe working in some humus or sand to break up Youngstown’s clay soils. You pulled out the lawn mower and sharpened the blade and tuned it up.

As a small kid, I always looked forward to dad getting the swing set out of storage. It was metal and he didn’t leave it out to rust. I also remember as I got older carrying our heavy porch chairs and porch swing from the basement coal cellar where we stored them for the winter to our front porch. For many years, dad hung green awnings to keep out the afternoon sun from the porch and the front part of the house.

These routines of spring cleaning reflected the pride of ownership our parents felt about our homes. For many, they were the first generation to own a home and they had worked hard to reach that goal. So it was a matter of self-respect to take good care of that investment–and if you didn’t the relatives let you know!

What are your memories of spring cleaning?

Want to read more “Growing up in Working Class Youngstown” posts? You can find all of them by going to my home page and clicking “On Youngstown” under categories.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Home Ownership

/ rtrube54 / 9 Comments

“So when are you going to fix that gutter?” A question like that would not be unusual from a neighbor in my neighborhood of working class Youngstown. During the time I was growing up, homes mattered to most of the people who lived in my neighborhood and other neighborhoods in working class Youngstown. For many, the simple reason was that for most of our parents, these were the first homes and property they and their family had ever owned. Before she married, my mother-in-law lived in apartments where residents shared a single bathroom. When she and her husband married, they scraped together the resources to buy a bungalow in Brownlee Woods. Things were tight at first and so furniture and carpet came later. My wife says they cared so much about the home that they used scissors to trim the edges of the lawn until they could afford shears!

There was such pride in ownership and a sense of a home being an asset that men would often come home from long days of work and take on a remodeling project–finishing a basement, adding a bathroom, updating a kitchen. My wife’s father designed, and with the help of his brothers, built a garage. Afterward, he and at least one of the brothers used the same design and built a similar one on that brother’s property. The women provided dinners.

It was the same way with my parents. They married just before the war and my dad enlisted to avoid the draft. For most of the early years of their marriage he was away. My mom, with the help of her father bought the house we grew up in. It was in walking distance of the elementary school, and close to where her parents were living at the time. When my dad came home, him and grandpa Scott took the existing garage which was at the bottom of a hill, and jacked it up onto supports, built a foundation under it, and added fill so that it was more easily accessible. I can’t imagine how much work that would have been!

The home I grew up in.

The home I grew up in.

There was a kind of social pressure to keep your place up. Neighborhoods were pretty stable in the 50s and 60s and people expected to live with each other a long time. So you kept your house painted, your grass cut, your leaves raked and the snow shoveled off your walk. One neighbor on my street had a front lawn that could have been a putting green, it was manicured so carefully! Mom always made sure we had plenty of flowers and that all the bushes were carefully trimmed. Once, when my folks were in their 80s and I was helping out, I trimmed some of the bushes. At this time my mom had macular degeneration and was nearly blind. She still notice a branch I missed!

Lots of things have been said about how the city has changed, and the deterioration of some neighborhoods. Part of it is that Youngstown had a housing stock that supported 170,000 people and now only a bit over 60,000 live in the city. Homes (including the one I grew up in) sit vacant, are vandalized, and if this continues long enough, are torn down. The cohesiveness of neighborhoods falls apart.

I don’t want to dwell on that. A different future is possible. Part of what I like about the work of Habitat for Humanity is that they not only build or renovate homes, but that they build neighborhoods of home owners, people who had in most cases never owned a home or dreamed they could. Their pride of ownership and their desire to sustain the value of the financial and sweat equity they’ve put into their homes means they encourage each other with the same kind of (mostly) constructive social pressure that the families in our neighborhood applied.

Neighborhoods of well-kept homes reflected a working-class value of pride in home ownership. Beautiful neighborhoods of well-kept homes were a street by street matter. It seems like this may be the case once again. Some areas have civic associations working to renew those areas. Some areas of Youngstown are being abandoned as the city attempts to downsize to fit its current population. PBS ran this story in 2011 that shows some of the neighborhoods and then-Mayor Jay Williams efforts to lead this effort in urban renewal. Youngstown still has its working class toughness and it is my hope that the new life of its city center and university can spread outward into neighborhoods of home owners who carry on the tradition of pride of ownership that was such an integral part of growing up in working class Youngstown.